A generation ago a trio stormed out of the Pacific Northwest to become the most critically acclaimed rock band of their era. They rode the crest of a fiercely independent, now-legendary musical subculture, steeped in the aesthetic iconoclasm and righteous angst of the best punk rock but with a twist of the ineffably unique. Their songs, blitzes of scalding guitar and thundering drums, were nonetheless sneakily melodic, featuring passionate, piercing vocals. When the dust had cleared — if it ever really has — they’d produced some of the best and most ferocious music of the past several decades. And they had a way cooler name than Nirvana.

Sleater-Kinney was a perfect fusion of musical personalities

This week Sub Pop releases Start Together, a limited-edition vinyl boxed set that contains all seven studio albums by Sleater-Kinney. It’s a body of work that spans 1995-2005 and ranks among the finest any American band has ever assembled. Forged in the riot grrrl cauldron of Olympia, Wash., Sleater-Kinney was the brainchild of singer/guitarists Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein, late of the bands Heavens to Betsy and Excuse 17, respectively. Boasting an unusual lineup of two guitars and drums — Janet Weiss would eventually become the band’s longest-tenured and most iconic drummer — Sleater-Kinney was a perfect fusion of musical personalities, a spiky and sparkling rock ‘n’ roll machine. Smart, funny, angry, beautiful, loudly and utterly unique, at their best they were a band for the ages, and as Start Together reminds, Sleater-Kinney were at their best nearly every time they stepped into a room together. And to quote another punk legend, the past isn’t even past: In the wake of Monday’s announcement of a forthcoming album and tour, Start Together heralds a revival in every sense.

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Sleater-Kinney took its name from an exit sign off Interstate 5, and in 1995 released a roaring laceration of a debut album on the aptly named Chainsaw Records. Sleater-Kinney was 10 tracks long and clocked in at a brisk 22 minutes, about the amount of time it takes to drink a strong IPA or watch an episode of Portlandia on Netflix. The following year saw the release of Call the Doctor, an enormous leap forward in every sense. At the end of 1996, Call the Doctor claimed the third slot in the Village Voice‘s Pazz and Jop critics’ poll, the first of four times that a Sleater-Kinney album would land in the poll’s top five.

The musical and emotional depths of 1997’s Dig Me Out were astonishing

In 1997, Sleater-Kinney jumped from Chainsaw to Kill Rock Stars, and released their third album, Dig Me Out. Dig Me Out took all the best elements of punk — its immediacy, its concision, its volubility — and wed it to some of the most adventurous writing and musicianship the genre had heard since the Clash. It was the band’s first album with Weiss, whose nimble, relentlessly creative drumming proved to be the perfect bridge between Brownstein and Tucker’s dueling down-tuned guitars. The album opened with the title track, a twisting thicket of gnarled guitars and drums that opens on to an anthemic refrain, then moved to “One More Hour,” an unexpectedly new wave-ish stew of stuttering drums and intricate, layered melodies.

The musical and emotional depths of the album were astonishing: From the aching “Buy Her Candy” to the coulda-shoulda-been-a-hit “Dance Song ’97,” the album distilled all the raucous fury of riot grrrl into 13 tracks of painstakingly crafted miniatures, then lovingly smashed the shit out of itself. “The catharsis Sleater-Kinney seek is more than just fun,” wrote Ann Powers, reviewing the album for Spin in 1997. “It’s a battle in earnest for the human right to know and possess yourself.”

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Seventeen years after its release Dig Me Out remains a landmark of 1990s rock, a work that doesn’t so much transcend its particular time and place as embody them so perfectly that it pulls you back through its sheer will. Had the members of Sleater-Kinney never played another note in its aftermath they would still be demi-legends, but instead they did something almost more improbable: They got even better. By the early 2000s, the band had moved toward a muscular, bluesy assuredness in both writing and playing, widening its instrumental palate to forge increasingly enormous soundscapes. 2002’s One Beat featured Stones-y hooks and horns while 2005’s The Woods was a stunning suite of guitar goddess noise-pop.

Perpetual underdog-ness probably contributed to the band’s allure

Sleater-Kinney never had a hit single or a gold album, and in some ways this perpetual underdog-ness probably contributed to the band’s allure. Sleater-Kinney was so smart, so special, so relatively secret that to love it instead of everything else that was more popular and less good indulged a rich sense of snowflake-ness. In 2003, when the trio landed a slot on Pearl Jam’s tour, the belated exposure felt deserved but bittersweet: Pearl Jam is a perfectly fine band whose everydude appeal and spot-the-influence classic-rock fluency are exactly the sort of things that Sleater-Kinney always promised a respite from. Three years later, after The Woods, Sleater-Kinney made one of the smartest decisions a band at the height of its powers can make: They broke up. The band’s dissolution inspired a raft of impassioned eulogies, including Marisa Meltzer for Slate and Rob Sheffield for Rolling Stone, who called them “the best American punk rock band ever.”

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Sleater-Kinney was almost certainly the most acclaimed American rock band of its time — Wilco is the only group that even comes close — and the question of why they never achieved broader success is an important and unpleasant one, particularly in a rock landscape that still treats female musicians primarily as texts to be read, suspiciously and never carefully. Joni Mitchell is one of the greatest musical minds of the past 50 years and the classic-rock set still mostly mentions her only when wondering which famous men inspired “Blue.” One of the biggest bands of Sleater-Kinney’s heyday was No Doubt, whose greatest hit, “Don’t Speak,” was about the female singer’s real-life failed relationship with the bass player, a fact mentioned incessantly during the song’s late-1990s ubiquity.

Sleater-Kinney did things their own way, refusing to chase fans through extra-musical spotlights or ill-conceived pop-star makeovers. They wrote passionate and urgent songs that eschewed the rote, damselish confessionalism that rock music still too often expects of female artists. Sleater-Kinney made art that you sought out, rather than vice versa, and as such was personal music in the best sense: warm, unique, personal for both the band and everyone who loved them. It’s just hard not to wonder why there weren’t more of those people, just as it’s easy to realize that audiences accommodate uncompromisingness better if you’re Radiohead than if you’re Sleater-Kinney.

But dwelling upon what didn’t happen misses the wilderness through the trees: The better story is what did happen, what is happening, and what might happen still. On the heels of this past weekend’s leak of a new song, “Bury Our Friends,” a new Sleater-Kinney album, No Cities to Love, will be released on Jan. 20, 2015 (appropriately, a 21-city international tour will follow). And they may find they have a new generation of admirers: The Girls Rock Camp movement that rose from the riot grrl embers of the Pacific Northwest in the early 2000s is now an international phenomenon, as the daughters of parents who once carted around copies of Dig Me Out in their Sony Discmen now pound their way into rock ‘n’ roll’s future.

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As Sleater-Kinney returns at 20 years old, we might say that they’re back to making the world a better place for little girls to play rock ‘n’ roll, and we’d be half-right: Sleater-Kinney is back to making the world a better place for every kid in it to play rock ‘n’ roll.

—Jack Hamilton is Slate’s pop critic. He is assistant professor of American studies and media studies at the University of Virginia.

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]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/music/sleater-kinney-guitar-goddesses-of-90s-punk-rock-are-on-the-comeback-trail-and-thats-good-for-american-music/feed0stdskCultural Studies: Are U2 even better than the real thing after their Apple release stunt for Songs of Innocence?http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/music/cultural-studies-are-u2-even-better-than-the-real-thing-after-their-apple-stunt
http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/music/cultural-studies-are-u2-even-better-than-the-real-thing-after-their-apple-stunt#commentsSat, 13 Sep 2014 11:30:45 +0000http://arts.nationalpost.com/?p=156545

“We’re the blood in your machines,” said Bono to Apple CEO Tim Cook on Tuesday at the launch of the iPhone 6, the Apple Watch, Apple Pay, and — oh yes — the new U2 album, Songs of Innocence. As Cook crowed about “the largest album release in history,” making the band’s 11 new songs available for free to over half a billion iTunes customers, U2 could be seen either to be taking advantage of a huge platform, or playing court entertainers to the man Bono called a “Zen master of hard- and software.” Here are four implications of this surprise release by a super-famous band that still moves in mysterious ways.

1. THE INDUSTRY

Songs of Innocence dropped out of nowhere, without even so much as an “Achtung Baby!” to prepare us. Bono & Co. aren’t pioneers: David Bowie and Beyoncé, for instance, have previously eschewed pre-release hype. Nor are U2 the first to make their albums available for free: Radiohead effectively did so back in 2007 with the pay-what-you-want In Rainbows; Prince has given away CDs with U.K. newspapers; and last year, Jay-Z made Magna Carta Holy Grail available to 1 million Samsung phone users. But the rollout of Songs for Innocence truly allows U2 to throw their arms around the world.

Rumours of the album’s demise are clearly exaggerated

Here, the role of the major-label marketing machine changes drastically: Apple has distributed the music, and the press and social media have trumpeted it from Cupertino to Ouagadougou, so Universal Music is left to somehow drum up excitement for the “deluxe edition” and physical release, products presumably aimed at diehard fans, to be released Oct. 13. Of course, there’s still the back catalogue to sell, and presumably the label, like U2, has been paid by Apple — as Bono pointed out at the launch, “We’re not going in for the free music ’round here.” Effectively the Irish quartet have employed a sponsorship model that harks back to the days of classical music, when wealthy impresarios would commission works to be played at court. With album sales continually slumping and advances lower than in the heady, wraparound-shades days of the early ’90s, direct sponsorship may become commonplace. Smaller bands turn to Kickstarter-type crowdsourced funding; U2 can go directly to The Man. And Apple is no disinterested music-business saviour: Such a release should further enshrine the company as the go-to place for everything digital (except your private photos).

2. THE ALBUM

Rumours of the album’s demise are clearly exaggerated: A substantial body of work is still the best way for artists to be taken seriously. And yet, how much time will people spend with something that arrives unbidden in their iTunes, for free? The “cover” of Songs of Innocence — i.e., the song bundle’s accompanying digital artwork — is a mock-up of a white-label LP. There’s an obvious irony here: Physical product is nearly dead, and Apple is nailing its coffin, as listeners will get to know this album as a set of highly compressed digital files designed to be listened to on their platforms.

With surprise releases such as U2’s, writers are truly scrambling

The danger is that, for all U2’s obviously earnest intent, they’ll be seen as simply promoting the platform, and that the album will be swallowed up by big hard drives and bigger clouds, in an interface that makes everything look uniform and therefore equivalent. Regardless, the gifting of this album does seem to hammer home one thing about the album format in 2014: it’s a great promotional flyer for an inevitable upcoming tour.

3. THE CRITICS

Time was when music critics acted as gatekeepers for listeners pondering which precious few, expensive LP/cassette/CDs they should purchase. Reviews would be based on good access to advance copies, but due to labels’ cost-cutting and paranoia about leaks, physical promo has been replaced by poor-quality streams and often just a supervised listen or two. With surprise releases such as U2’s, writers are truly scrambling. Harried by their outlets’ desire to be “first” on everything, they’re reduced to hedging bets while meeting super-tight deadlines. Witness Caspar Llewellyn-Smith’s statement about Songs of Innocence in The Guardian: “all is opaque, at least on a first listen.” Music fans need such “considered opinions” like a fish needs a bicycle. The best a critic can hope to do is to add context and illuminate certain aspects of the record for those who will have had ample chance to listen already. The most worthwhile critical writing does this anyway. Anyone can tweet first reactions; maybe the surprise release will convince editors to relent and allow writers the chance to reflect once again.

4. THE BAND

Lester Bangs once wrote that Joey Ramone had “the courage to be himself, especially at the sacrifice of a whole passel of macho defences.” U2 lead off Songs of Innocence with “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone),” a paean to the late punk-rocker who taught a teenage Bono by example that it was OK to sing “like a girl.” Thirty-four years after their first album, Boy, this most self-aware of pop/rock bands is excavating its past, with music paying homage to its influences (including Joe Strummer and the Beach Boys) and lyrics that, like the William Blake poems that gave the album its name, leave room for insecurity and ambiguity in a simply presented package.

With every three studio albums, U2 have broken with their recent past: The atmospheric The Unforgettable Fire (album No. 4), the electronic, ironic Achtung Baby (No. 7) and the somewhat stripped-back All That You Can’t Leave Behind (No. 10) offered hard left turns, and Songs of Innocence (No. 13) plays the “rebirth” card with even more determination. Certainly their last release, No Line on the Horizon, with its dense production and meandering songwriting, showed they could stand to declutter. Producer Danger Mouse helps with this, digging out Adam Clayton’s bass, streamlining Larry Mullen, Jr.’s drum sound, and adding gutsy fuzz to The Edge’s guitar, while maintaining a stadium-ready expansiveness — and some melancholy minor-key hooks that recall his own band, Broken Bells.

This inviting, no-filler collection doesn’t sound as if it was six years in the making. Its most complex tracks — the dynamic “Cedarwood Road” and the elegiac closer “The Troubles” — suggest an intriguing, Danger Mouse-led new direction: episodic, narrative pop. Doubtless, U2 will tour and tour from here, but really Songs of Innocence is crying out for the band, with its renewed energy, to run back to the studio and build on this new foundation. Bono has at least hinted at a Songs of Experience to follow. The only question is, who’s going to pay?

Creep, the first single from Radiohead, was recorded in 1992 and helped the band become one of the most iconic rock groups of the past 25 years. Led by the inimitable vocalist Thom Yorke, Radiohead released such landmark albums as The Bends (1993), OK Computer (1997), Kid A (2000), Amnesiac (2001) and In Rainbows (2007) . This week, Yorke returned with Atoms for Peace, a dance-rock hybrid he formed with Flea, bassist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. In honour of the new album, and Yorke’s peculiar brand of defiant strangeness, we pored over his old interviews to create a pseudo oral history.

To Melody Maker, Sept. 25, 1993:
“A lot of journalists said, ‘This is a joke song, right?’ Well, yeah, but no. … It was an accident. I suppose it is ironic now, because I have to ask myself all the time whether or not I’m still an outsider. I think I am. I’ve just been pushed into a different corner. … The second album is going to be much better than the first.”

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To journalist Simon Gill, Sept. 23, 1994:
“I am a sulky little git whenever the press is around because I hate the press — but that’s their problem. … We’d like to be making records five, 10 years from now, but whether anyone buys them or not, that’s another issue. … The thing that kills popular culture is certain people with a lot of power or cash can tell other people what to go out and buy. … Pop stars changing the world are just pop stars with a bad conscience — and pure ignorance. … I like being an outsider because the people inside are jerks.”

To Rolling Stone, September 1995
“People sometimes ask me if I’m happy and I tell them to f–k off. If I was happy, I’d be in a car advert. … I feel tremendous guilt for any sexual feelings I have, so I end up spending my entire life feeling sorry for fancying somebody. Even in school I thought girls were so wonderful that I was scared to death of them. I masturbate a lot. … I’m completely losing touch with who I am, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t anything to Thom Yorke other than the guy that makes those painful songs.”

To Sook-Yin Lee on MuchMusic, June 1997
“We had three songs that we didn’t know what to do with so we put them into one — Paranoid Android. We were embarrassed to be a guitar band — bored, bored, bored of guitars.”

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To The Observer, October 2000
“There’s a fine line between writing something with genuine emotional impact and turning into little idiots feeling sorry for ourselves and playing stadium rock. … We live in Oxford, and in Oxford we are lower class. The place is full of the most obnoxious, self-indulgent, self-righteous oiks on the planet, and for us to be called middle class … well, no, actually. Be around on May Day when they all reel out of the pubs at five in the morning puking up and going, ‘haw haw haw,’ and trying to hassle your girlfriend.”

To a fan documentarian, 2002:
“There’s something about having to grab people around the neck that I really miss.”

From the documentary Reflections on Kid A, 2003:
“I spent two years with writer’s block, throwing stuff away — it’s like losing someone you love. … Even being called a rock band was a nightmare. Rock music sucks. I hate it. It’s a waste of time.”

In a video recorded at the Montreal Jazz Festival, July 2003
“Kid A, the whole record was based around the idea of hiding, which I picked up from electronic music. There’s no identity in electronic music, which I found very inspiring.”

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To Spin magazine, June 2006
“I think biting the hand that feeds you is incredibly important.”

To The Observer, June 2006
“Being a rock star, you’re supposed to have super über-confidence all the time. And I don’t. It was my missus telling me to get it together basically.”

To Pitchfork, August 2006
“The whole point of creating music for me is to give voice to things that aren’t normally given voice to, and a lot of those things are extremely negative. I have to remain positive otherwise I’d go crazy.”

To Wired, Dececember 2007, on the pay-what-you-can release of In Rainbows
“It wasn’t nihilistic, implying that the music’s not worth anything. It was the total opposite. And people took it as it was meant. Maybe that’s just people having a little faith in what we’re doing.”

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To Rolling Stone, November 2012
“When we first hung out, we were at Flea’s house. We got wasted, played pool and listened to Fela Kuti all night. It was that idea of trance-ing out. But there are still songs here. I’d love to be a storyteller. But I can’t do it.”

To Esquire, March, 2013
“Kids teach you to lighten up, which for me was very handy. They were a blessing for that.”

Amok by Atoms for Peace is out now on XL Recordings. For more information, visit atomsforpeace.info

Less than a week after the June 16 Downsview Park stage collapse ahead of a Radiohead concert in Toronto that left drum technician Scott Johnson dead and three others injured, the band has released a statement indicating that, due to damages, several upcoming European tour dates are being rescheduled. The full statement is below.

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As you will probably have heard the roof over the stage collapsed at our show in Toronto killing crew member Scott Johnson and injuring three other crew members. The collapse also destroyed the light show – this show was unique and will take many weeks to replace. The collapse also caused serious damage to our backline, some elements of which are decades old and therefore hard to replace.

Whilst we all are dealing with the grief and shock ensuing from this terrible accident there are also many practical considerations to deal with & consequently we have to try and reschedule the following shows:

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan DenetteEmergency personnel at the scene of the collapsed stage at Downsview Park Saturday. A Radiohead drum technician was killed in the accident.

Behind Metcalf Chicken Tenders, a midway-style food cart advertising “Chicken on a Stick” and “Cheese Fries” that was parked Monday on the lawn at Downsview Park, sat a sad hill of 50-lb bags of potatoes. They never saw the deep fryer.

Yellow-shirted Northwest Security Service guards hired by Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promoter, on Monday afternoon permitted the fast-food vendor’s staff through the fence and onto the lawn, where the huge Radiohead concert was to take place Saturday night. The staff packed up pump dispensers of ketchup, relish, vinegar and mustard that had sat two nights on a folding table in front of the stand, unused.

A bit further away, men in reflective vests tore red Budweiser banners off hundreds of metres of cattle fencing leading to beer tents that never served beer. Generators, ice makers and refrigerated trailers sat nearby.

REUTERS/Alexandra MihanThe stage at Downsview Park in Toronto is shown before (top) and after it collapsed Saturday.

In the distance stood the stage, its central stainless-steel portion crumpled in a huge heap, like the tangled remains of a squished daddy long-legs spider. The collapse on Saturday killed Scott Johnson, Radiohead’s drum technician, and injured three other workers. When the stage fell, the steel tubing pulled with it a grey tarp, which hung over the stage like a funeral shroud, fluttering in the hot breeze.

Luc Turcotte, who built stages for outdoor concerts for many years, said stage-builders have tightened practices in recent years.

“The stage company hires an engineer to draw up the plans, and then I hire my own engineer to review those designs,” he told me Monday from Montreal, where he worked erecting the stage for the annual St. Jean Baptiste celebration.

Mr. Turcotte studied photos of the Toronto collapse. “It was bad luck or mechanical failure,” he said. “It will come out in the engineer’s report.”

He noted that a crew erected an identical stage for Radiohead’s show at the Bell Centre in Montreal two days earlier without incident.

Fully 48 hours after the stage collapsed, no workers made any effort to take it apart. Two police cars and an ambulance sat nearby.

“I was here when it fell at 4 o’clock Saturday,” said one Metcalf worker. “There wasn’t any wind or nothing. I just heard a loud bang and then down it came.”

Across the huge field, Everett, a worker at HSI, the maintenance division at Toronto Community Housing — whose head office is at Downsview — had a front-row seat to the preparation of this site, near the corner of Carl Hall Road and John Drury Drive, for the huge Radiohead concert; a job done fairly hastily in his view.

I was here when it fell at 4 o’clock Saturday. There wasn’t any wind or nothing. I just heard a loud bang and then down it came

“The park spent so much money preparing this particular site,” he says, “levelling it up. Two weeks ago they started sodding.”

No sooner had workers laid the sod, the stage crew arrived. “They spent a whole week putting that up, piece by piece, rail by rail, maybe a dozen college kids. It’s the biggest stage I’ve ever seen here.”

On Monday, Live Nation put out a statement about the Saturday afternoon collapse: “This accident is being investigated but we do not have any further details at this time. Our thoughts and prayers go out to Mr. Johnson’s family and friends and to the Radiohead family.” No one answered the phone at Live Nation’s Toronto office.

The Ontario Ministry of Labour named four companies involved in setting up the concert stage: Optex Staging and Services Inc., Nasco Staffing Solutions, Ticker Tape Touring LLP and Live Nation. Provincial investigators worked at the site Monday, but offered no other details.

They will have to wrap things up quickly: in 10 days Downsview Park plans to welcome Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Right after that, the park hosts the rock concert Edgefest.

Back at Metcalf Chicken Tenders, the staff hurried to fold down the tin signs and pack up flats of Coke, Sprite and Dasani water.

“We’ve gotta set up again over there,” a worker said, gesturing across the park. “We’ve got another concert tomorrow night.” Tokyo Police Club is playing, joined by Foster the People.

English rock band Radiohead released a statement on its website and Facebook page Sunday mourning the loss of the band’s drum technician, Scott Johnson, who died when an outdoor stage collapsed before a concert in Toronto on Saturday afternoon.

“We have all been shattered by the loss of Scott Johnson, our friend and colleague,” wrote band member Philip Selway on the band’s website. “He was a lovely man, always positive, supportive and funny; a highly skilled and valued member of our great road crew. We will miss him very much. Our thoughts and love are with Scott’s family and all those close to him.”

The incident happened in Downsview Park around 4 p.m.

Radiohead was scheduled to perform at a soldout concert for about 40,000 people in the park that evening.

Const. Tony Vella with the Toronto Police Service said a number of workers were on the stage getting ready for the concert when “the top portion of the stage came crashing down.”

“There were a number of people who managed to escape,” he said, “but unfortunately, four people were hurt.”

Mr. Johnson, 33, was among the four. He was pronounced dead at the scene, said a spokesman for Toronto EMS. EMS said firefighters were not able to retrieve Mr. Johnson’s body until after 8 p.m.

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REUTERS/Alexandra MihanThe stage at Downsview Park in Toronto is shown before (top) and after it collapsed Saturday.

Firefighters had to move slowly so they could safely get under the wreckage without having the stage collapse even further.

Another man, 45, was taken to a trauma centre with serious head injuries after falling debris struck him in the head, and two other people sustained minor injuries, the EMS spokesman said.

Matt Blajer, a spokesman for the Ontario Ministry of Labour, said that three inspectors and two engineers spent the evening at the park scouring the wreckage of the stage and stabilizing it. The crew were back Sunday to investigate what went wrong, if safety regulations were followed and if staff were properly trained.

Mr. Blajer said the investigation is “fairly complex” and it could take some time to figure out exactly what happened. He hopes to find out the name of the company that provided the stage by Sunday night or Monday morning.

The stage collapse in Downsview Park is the latest in a string of similar incidents in recent years. Six people died in August 2011 when a stage fell at a concert in Indianapolis and five died when a storm toppled a stage at a festival in Belgium. In Canada, several people were hurt when a stage at Bluesfest in Ottawa went down during a storm in July 2011 and one person died in 2009 when a windstorm collapsed the stage at the Big Valley Jamboree in Alberta.

Radiohead posted messages to say everybody who bought a concert ticket would be refunded at the point of purchase. Many fans posted their condolences to the band and to Mr. Johnson’s family.

With files from the Canadian Press

Nathan Denette / The Canadian PressEmergency personnel at the scene near the collapsed stage at Downsview Park in Toronto on Saturday, just hours before Radiohead was due to play.

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Ministry spokesman Matt Blajer says the massive structure is “still fairly unstable” and work is underway to make it safe.

REUTERS/Alexandra MihanThe stage at Downsview Park in Toronto is shown before (top) and after it collapsed Saturday.

He says investigators are looking to see whether safety regulations and standards were followed and staff were properly trained.

He says the investigation is “fairly complex” and it could take some time to figure out exactly what happened.

The sold-out show was cancelled before it even began, forcing ticketholders — many of them from out of town — to turn back.

There’ve been a number of stage collapses in recent years.

Six people died last August when the stage fell at a concert in Indianapolis and five died when a storm toppled a stage at a festival in Belgium.

In Canada, several people were hurt when the stage went down at Bluesfest in Ottawa last July and one person died in 2009 when a windstorm collapsed the stage at the Big Valley Jamboree in Alberta.

The Canadian Press

Matthew Sherwood for National Post)

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/labour-ministry-inspectors-probe-deadly-stage-collapse-at-toronto-radiohead-concert/feed0stdRadiohead stage collapse Toronto 2012The stage at Downsview Park in Toronto is shown before (top) and after it collapsed Saturday.Matthew Sherwood for National Post)Stage collapses prior to Radiohead show in Toronto, 1 killedhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/stage-collapses-prior-to-radiohead-show-in-toronto-1-killed-report
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/stage-collapses-prior-to-radiohead-show-in-toronto-1-killed-report#commentsSat, 16 Jun 2012 21:02:57 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=184670

TORONTO — With a loud rumble that one witness compared to a roller coaster, a stage collapsed Saturday hours before a concert by the alternative rock band Radiohead, killing one person.

”Suddenly, there was a loud crash and it sounded like sheet metal and lightening and we just saw the stage collapse,” said Dusty Lalas, an employee with Toronto radio station The Edge, which was sponsoring the concert.

“The structure just caved in.”

No band members were believed to be on stage at the time of the collapse, but concert crew were working on stage when it fell shortly after 4 p.m.

Chris Collins was heading to the show and saw the stage come down from the parking lot at Downsview Park.

“To be honest, it sounded like a roller coaster,” Collins told ABC News. “Basically, like a series of clacking noises and increasing in volume as the collapse proceeded.”

Images showed the roof had collapsed onto the stage. Police and paramedics confirmed one person died, but it was not immediately known precisely how the individual died, nor was the victim’s identity released.

“The piping which makes up the roof structure where lights and whatnot are supported collapsed down, and our understanding is there was workers setting up the stage, I believe it would be roadies setting up the amps, guitars whatever,” Mike Strapko, a Captain with Toronto Fire Service told Toronto news channel CP 24.

It was not immediately known what caused the collapse. The weather was sunny and clear in Toronto.

An injured person was transported to hospital, while another injured person was treated at the scene, Toronto police said.

The concert was cancelled, according to a tweet by the band. Radiohead’s website had listed the concert as being sold out.

Westboro Baptist Church found its way to a Radiohead concert yesterday in Kansas City.

Standing outside the band’s venue at the Sprint Center, representatives of the church held signs printed with slogans including “You’re going to Hell” and their famous: “God Hates Fags.”

“God is undoing this nation and effecting all of your lives, with the moth that quietly eats the very fabric of your national garment,” the Church said in a statement on its website. “Radiohead is just such an event.”

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The Church goes on to call the band “Freak monkeys with mediocre tunes.”

The band has long experimented with new sounds and lyrical subject matter ranging from the banality of suburban life on OK Computer to an Orwellian take on the American political process in Hail to the Thief.

Earlier on Monday, the band’s producer, Nichel Godrich, responded to the protest on twitter, “Highlight of the tour so far… Being picketed by westboro baptist church this evening.. Hoorah!” Goderich included a photo of the protest in his tweet (see below).

Highlight of the tour so far… Being picketed by westboro baptist church this evening.. Hoorah!
http://t.co/lC6fVfiU

Radiohead is currently touring North America in support of its 2011 album The King of Limbs.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood will release a new album stemming from collaboration with Polish avant-garde composer Krzysztof Penderecki. A 2008 version of one of Greenwood’s album tracks, Popcorn Superhet Receiver, can be watched here.

Start dreaming of summer festival season — particularly one spent somewhere in the middle of the California desert, possibly in the company of a handful of your favourite movie stars (and Danny DeVito): the lineup for the Coachella 2012 is here, and for the first time in the event’s 13-year history, organizers will stage two weekends of events, happening April 13-15 and April 20-22. Both editions will feature headlining sets from blues-rockers the Black Keys (Friday), indie elder statesmen Radiohead (Saturday) and hip-hop icons Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg (Sunday).

A full lineup was posted on the festival’s Facebook page Monday, revealing an eclectic bill as any other. Ticketholders can anticipate performances from a variety of reunited acts (Mazzy Star, Pulp, fIREHOSE, At The Drive In, Refused, among others), as well as hyped-up hip-hop and R&B artists (The Weeknd, A$AP Rocky, Azealia Banks, Frank Ocean, Childish Gambino), the usual indie suspects (Feist, The Shins, Beirut, Wild Flag, Florence + The Machine) and every bro’s favourite EDM acts (David Guetta, Swedish House Mafia, Girl Talk, Calvin Harris).

And this year’s new double-weekend format was developed so that more fans would have access to the fun, because as Goldenvoice head and festival organizer Paul Tollett told the L.A. Times, the back-to-back weekends were launched in response to ever-increasing demand for passes. Tickets for the 2011 edition, for example, reportedly sold out one week after the line-up reveal. “We wanted to create access for as many people as possible,” Tollett told the paper, continuing to say: “The thought of this selling out super quick, and the only people who get to go are the people who bought the first minute or bought tickets for more than they sold for, that didn’t seem great to us,” he said. “We didn’t want to go with more people and ruin the experience. We can’t add a midnight show, and we didn’t want to add another city or raise the ticket price. So we decided to add another weekend.”

Information on ticket packages can be found on the Coachella website, with festival passes set to go on sale Friday, Jan. 13 at 10 a.m. An advance pre-sale was offered in June of 2011, obviously long before a lineup was announced. According to the Times, pre-sale figures have not been released.

Just a few days before Christmas, a song claimed to be a lost Radiohead track entitled Putting Ketchup in the Fridge appeared on YouTube. Fans quickly debated whether the song was from The Bends era or pre-1995, and the audio landed on Radiohead fan websites and eventually made the rounds at NME and Gawker.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aspDN0iF8zg&w=620&h=379]

Turns out everyone was wrong: The song is actually entitled Sit Still and belongs to a Toronto baker named Christopher Stopa, who recorded the track back in 2001 with his band Public.

According to Torontoist, Stopa was alerted to the rumour by a friend, and when he visited the NME’s website he was sure he hadn’t turned off his iTunes or that he had become the victim of a prank. He posted the link on his Facebook page, and before long, the story was picked up by CNN.

As nice as it is, because I like Radiohead, and on some technical level it means I sang [the song] well, I don’t really want to be known as the person that was mistaken [for] Radiohead,” said Stopa, who had shopped a copy of the Sit Still demo to a few labels in New York many years ago, before moving back to Toronto to establish BakerBots Bakery. “Art is about making something interesting.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/lost-radiohead-song-actually-the-work-of-toronto-musicianbaker/feed0stdradioheadHere are the Top 10 Albums of 2011, as chosen by youhttp://news.nationalpost.com/arts/here-are-the-top-10-albums-of-2011-as-chosen-by-you
http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/here-are-the-top-10-albums-of-2011-as-chosen-by-you#commentsTue, 27 Dec 2011 16:52:45 +0000http://arts.nationalpost.com/?p=57307

A couple of weeks ago, National Post arts writers, critics, reviewers and general music-lovers got together to name their favourite albums of the year, resulting in a highly unofficial list of 42 great records, presented in no particular order. And while it was lots of fun to present our picks and extol their virtues, we though there must be some way for us to rank our faves – and that’s when we turned to you, the reader, and asked you to pick your Top 10 Albums of the Year from our list of 42. And you did! So here, after nearly 3,000 votes and much discussion of how, exactly, we forgot to include Destroyer’s Kaputt on our list, are the Top 10 Albums of 2011, as chosen by you:

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/here-are-the-top-10-albums-of-2011-as-chosen-by-you/feed0stdadeleEmboldened oldies: The future of music is being written by fortysomething artistshttp://news.nationalpost.com/arts/emboldened-oldies-the-future-of-music-is-being-written-by-fortysomething-artists
http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/emboldened-oldies-the-future-of-music-is-being-written-by-fortysomething-artists#commentsMon, 19 Dec 2011 21:00:01 +0000http://arts.nationalpost.com/?p=56719

As a new calendar year approaches, our writers reflect on what they learned from pop culture over the past 12 month. Here, Adam McDowell discusses the average age of today’s chart-topping musicians (hint: it’s around 40).

“I am pleased with it, because I feel it’s a grand departure from anything before,” PJ Harvey told Spinner magazine in 2009. She was working on Let England Shake, arguably the most innovative, and possibly best, album of 2011.

Wrote one critic: “Francis Ford Coppola can lay claim to the war movie. Ernest Hemingway the war novel. Polly Jean Harvey, a 41-year-old from Dorset, has claimed the war album.” (She’s 42 now.)

That was Mike Williams for the influential British music magazine NME, which tends to behave as if high praise were restricted by wartime rationing. Nevertheless, Williams soaked in Let England Shake’s unexpected hooks, clever lyrics and heart-stirring arrangements and granted it a 10 out of 10. Let England Shake later won Britain’s 2011 Mercury Prize for best British album.

Harvey’s age and experience worked for her, Williams wrote: “Let England Shake is an album that only the Polly Harvey of today could have written.”

Harvey was far from the only fortysomething artist who made music worth talking about in 2011. Musicians who broke in the 1990s made some of the most musically exciting albums of 2011, the kind of stuff you throw on and get wowed by.

Lucky they did, because most of this past year’s young hitmakers are staunch musical conservatives. Lady Gaga’s image may be edgy, but her music continues to be derivative. Katy Perry and Justin Bieber are glossy packaging for the familiar flavour of bubblegum. They continue to build their careers with predictable music that, aside from some production trickery, could have been put out 20 years ago. Even Drake and Adele may excel at what they do, but are hardly revolutionary.

So is there any longer a generational creativity gap in popular music? If the young ever had a monopoly on getting something new and exciting into your ears, they’ve lost it. In popular music, 42 increasingly sounds like the new 21.

The gentlemen of Radiohead (all in their early forties) were praised for once again pushing their envelope, and everyone else’s, with The King of Limbs. Kate Bush, 53, made an exceptionally well-reviewed concept album, 50 Words for Snow. Björk, 46, kept being Björk.

On this continent, Jay-Z, 41, held his own with Kanye West, 34, and together they proved that a supergroup-type collaboration could shine. To Britain’s Daily Telegraph, far from alone in praising the album, it “sounds like a coherent and purposeful piece of work, a statement of what hip hop can mean, and where it can go.”

When it comes to sales, popular music is still a youngster’s game. The rocker dads of The National can’t touch Bieber. But it’s worth asking what big new ideas and grand departures, if any, the young folk are bringing into music itself.

Writing recently in Vanity Fair, American author and journalist Kurt Andersen argued that true creativity in music, as in most of popular culture, has stalled for 20 years. Look at 2011 vs. 1991, he wrote: “Lady Gaga has replaced Madonna, Adele has replaced Mariah Carey — both distinctions without a real difference — and Jay-Z and Wilco are still Jay-Z and Wilco.”

Equating Adele with Mariah Carey is unfair to Adele, to the point of being bizarre. But the 23-year-old Englishwoman is at best a talented postmodernist, a combiner of things that have gone before.

Imagine grabbing a CD by Lady Gaga or Katy Perry or any other young hitmaker from our Age of Derivative. You hop into your Delorean and zip back to 1991. Would our 2011 sounds truly dazzle and challenge the ears of yesteryear? Would a single feather be ruffled, or a mind blown?

Back then, the mainstream listener was on the cusp of being introduced to fresh genres: grunge, trip hop, gangsta rap. Today’s horizon looks barren in comparison.

It seems an industry coping with technological change — and the tantalizing possibility of reaching a global marketplace — is in no mood to innovate. A breaking mega-artist in her twenties is under intense pressure to play for all the marbles, to deliver a safe hook to 12-year-olds who buy one track at a time.

“The stakes are so much higher. You’ve got a worldwide audience now that’s just waiting for [a big hit],” says Eric Alper, director of media relations and label acquisitions at Entertainment One Group.

In a rewind to the Motown era, the single is king again. Yet the album, as a format, fosters a trial-and-error approach to music. The songs not destined for radio offer the artist a place to play around. That’s why experimentation and auditory weirdness are left to the thirty- and fortysomethings. The PJ Harveys and Radioheads and Björks of the world are no longer expected to sell in the many millions of copies. But their fans are young enough to keep buying what they produce, and in the form of whole albums. The audience is the opportunity, a chance to freely breathe the air of creative latitude.

On the flip side, today’s mega-sellers, the Adeles and Gagas, will wake up one day to find their audiences have largely moved on. The pressure to play it safe will be gone, too.

Alper looks forward to Bieber reaching that stage. “Maybe 10 years from now he says, ‘I want to do an album now that I want to write.’ That’s the one I’ll be waiting for. He’ll put some cool stuff on there.”

Rapper Kanye West led the field of Grammy contenders on Wednesday with seven nominations, including for his album “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” and his joint venture with Jay-Z “Watch The Throne.”

But British singer Adele — whose album “21” is the biggest-selling of 2011 — and R&B artist Bruno Mars were close behind with six apiece, including nods for the three big awards of album, song and record of the year.

Related

Other leading contenders for the major music industry awards show include U.S. alternative rock band Foo Fighters, also with six nominations, while rapper Lil Wayne and newcomer Skrillex had five nominations apiece.

The nominations for the top awards were announced during a televised concert in Los Angeles featuring performances by Lady Gaga, Usher and up-and-coming country singers The Band Perry.

Winners in all 78 categories will be announced at the Grammy Awards ceremony and show on February 12.

Traditional rock bands were largely missing from the leading categories, with hip-hop artists and female singers including Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Katy Perry grabbing the spotlight.

The best new artist category produced a particularly eclectic mix of female rapper Nicki Minaj, hip-hop artist J. Cole, country sensations The Band Perry, house and electropop performer Skrillex and American folk band Bon Iver.

WEST MAKES GOOD

The seven Grammy nods for West crowned a critical and commercial comeback for the controversial 34 year-old rapper who took a self-imposed hiatus from performing in 2009.

West recorded his best rap album contender “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” in Hawaii after removing himself from the mainstream U.S. music scene following harsh criticism over his 2009 outburst involving country starlet Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards.

West, already a 14 time Grammy winner, was also nominated for song of the year for “All of the Lights” and best rap performance with Jay-Z for “Otis”.

Mars, 26, won three of his nominations on the back of his hit song “Grenade” off his debut album “Doo-Waps & Hooligans”.

“It feels incredible right now,” Mars told reporters.

“I’m so glad the album is being recognized in this way.” “This awards stuff, I’m still trying to get used to it. It’s hard for me as Adele and Kanye West are incredible, so the fact that the album was nominated in same category is amazing,” Mars said.

Adele’s six nominations mark the culminations of a momentous year for the 23 year-old singer, who won a Grammy for best new artist in 2009.

The sultry soul singer was recognized both for her album “21”, which has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide, as well as her two smash singles “Rolling in the Deep” and “Someone Like You.”

But the London-born singer is currently recovering from surgery on her vocal cords in November after suffering repeated voice problems and cancellations during her U.S. tour this year. It is not known whether she will have recovered in time to sing at the Grammy Awards in February.

For every Freddie Mercury, Joey Ramone or Jim Morrison, with their locked-in timeless pop images that act as wellsprings of nostalgia for bygone musical eras, there is a Michael Hutchence, a Sid Vicious, an Ian Curtis — those whose careers in music, owing partly to the causes of their early deaths, their tortured existences while alive, their musical styles and their bands’ inauspicious endings, are remembered predominantly alongside the historical footnotes of their respective demises. Playing their back catalogues on headphones, or alone in the dark, one feels a certain amount of guilt, knowing that the act of ruminating in these creative cul-de-sacs is a rejection of life, of music itself. From the early punk, goth and new wave of the late 1970s and early ’80s springs much of what coloured the “alternative” genre, as it was called then, for nearly two decades or more — certainly at least till 1997, when Radiohead released OK Computer. And listening to that creative output affirms life, that music goes on. But playing the Sex Pistols, Nirvana, and certainly Joy Division too often in one day can, well, become at best macabre, and at worst … downright depressing.

Which is why when I heard Peter Hook, the estranged bass player of New Order (he had a falling out with Bernard Sumner and the rest of the band in 2007 that I won’t recount here), was securing the rights to release a Joy Division EP and tour with the 30-year-old material, I was skeptical and even a touch unnerved at the prospect of these long dormant songs being performed live. Spectacle, I thought, is all that can result. Macabre singalongs. Posturing. Grief masquerading as frenetic punk energy long bottled away. The midlife crisis of an aging Mancunian put on display for profit and odd public fawning. A rock wake long put off — or a sort of zombie march through the droning hits of Unknown Pleasures and Closer, punctuated with woos, fist pumps and half-remembered choruses. In short, animated memento mori: the crowd, backing band and Hook, in a way, laughing at all the grief, and oddly, releasing it. Singing it out, not unlike what Emily Haines or Dan Boeckner — two Canadian musicians heavily influenced by Joy Division/New Order — have done since.

Now, the show I’m about to recount was all of that — and just a little bit of something else, too. What’s perhaps most interesting, though, is the almost biblical way that Hook, having been cast out of the phoenix band that rose after Curtis’s death (New Order formed directly from the remains of JD, with all the members except Curtis playing together for more than two decades after to much critical and commercial success), returned directly to the source material. No doubt there were pragmatic and legal reasons for this (the band, without Hook, has continued to perform talk about touring as New Order, but it’s hard to imagine them maintaining their energy without their longtime bassist’s key contributions to the music), but Saturday’s gig showed that this tour of his wasn’t merely a Hooky vendetta, or cash grab, or need for fan adoration.

It was all of those things, of course, with Hook’s ego on parade all over the stage (why shouldn’t it be? He’s at least twice the bassist Adam Clayton ever was), but it was also a heart-rending homage to the original band, and a great example of rock showmanship.

Some critics have charged that these Unknown Pleasures and Closer outings are Peter Hook and the Light “covering” Joy Division. But I’m not sure that’s entirely fair — Hook’s backing band, The Light — composed of guitarist Nat Wason, Paul Kehoe on drums, Andy Poole on keys and Jack Bates filling in the bass parts that weren’t suitable for Hooky grandstanding — is a tightly wound outfit, and they don’t just know the JD back catalogue — they appeared (and sounded) to have internalized a lot of the anguish and frustrated energy of the songs, too, belting along at least in line with Hook’s own intensity, and at times, particularly in the case of Wason’s playing, surpassing him.

Hook, looking beefy and stuffed in a tight, sweaty T-shirt he’d peel off and pelt at us after the encore (yuck), was commanding and theatrical, with his trademark fluff of a fauxhawk and enormous red bass, even if he only played it for about 15-20 minutes total out of a generous 90-minute set. To be fair, Hook did have his hands full channelling the haunting vocals. Perhaps most worrisome to fans was how this aspect of the tour would come off. But Hook, with his right or left fist almost always held aloft in front of him, growled out the words to Leaders of Men, Digital (a true highlight), She’s Lost Control and I Remember Nothing with a fierce defiance. Curtis was renowned before his suicide for appearing to allow his mental torture to tip over and take hold of live performances, but Hooky was winking at us the whole time — this is an act, he seemed to be shouting to us, and that’s fine. It’s what it always should have been — not some sort of life and death drama.

The crowd seemed to gain strength towards the end of the set — we hurtled (dancing near the stage was furiously close to being a mosh pit, but never quite approached it, in true post-punk form) through material not native to Unknown Pleasures — Dead Souls, Transmission and the inevitable Love Will Tear Us Apart catharsis — but a three-quarter-filled Phoenix can sap any band’s energy, so it wasn’t surprising we didn’t get any of the special deliveries dropped off in Denver earlier on this tour, where Ceremony and These Days formed a second encore, or at Pop Montreal on Sunday, where the band performed the New Order track Dreams Never End for the first time — a rare treat, given that the original 1981 vocals were sung by Hook, not Bernard Sumner.

But it’s tough to begrudge Hooky for those trifles.

Verdict: Peter Hook finally putting his first band on the funeral pyre and bringing long-suffering fans along for his speaker-jumping, axe-grinding, Ian Curtis-warbling ride? It might finally let Joy Division’s music rest in peace.

That upcoming Colbert Report episode is only the beginning, it seems. Radiohead’s Thom Yorke revealed the band is plotting a tour for 2012 during a chat on BBC Radio 1 Monday night.

“The idea is to go out and play next year on and off during the year,” said Yorke while co-hosting Giles Peterson’s Radio 1 show, though he kept further details about as inscrutable as a Radiohead lyric.

Radiohead is scheduled to play two back-to-back club dates in New York City next week, and they memorably turned up at England’s Glastonbury Festival this June with a surprise set. Still, since releasing current record The King of Limbs in February, the band has kept from touring. A few dates in support of this, their eighth album, would seem overdue.

Perhaps more interesting, then, was another tidbit Yorke shared between spinning records by Flying Lotus, Modeselektor, Massive Attack — and, you know, his own solo stuff and a few Radiohead cuts.

Yorke said he’s “finishing” a new album with Atoms For Peace — his project with the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea and Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich. The group played a few shows together last year, and as Yorke said during his Radio 1 set, that experience “sparked something off, it was really exciting … It had really good energy.”

Radiohead is playing The Colbert Report next Monday, Sept. 26. And though they won’t be the first stunt musical guest to join Stephen Colbert in his tireless pursuit of The Truthiness, Radiohead have the honour of featuring in the program’s first ever hour-long episode.

The band is expected to perform four songs including unreleased track The Daily Mail and selections from current album The King of Limbs — plus a bonus song for the Colbert Report‘s website.

But four songs — even Radiohead songs — does not an hour make. At least twenty minutes of Thom York mumbling seems entirely possible. And whatever happens, host Stephen Colbert has issued a very Colbert statement about the upcoming show.

“I look forward to meeting the Radioheads and leveraging their anti-corporate indie cred to raise brand awareness for my sponsors,” he wrote.

Radiohead, who surprised music fans by releasing The King of Limbs in February just five days after announcing its existence, will soon be “raising brand awareness” at a variety of performances in New York. They’re booked to play back-to-back club sets at the city’s Roseland Ballroom Sept. 28 and 29 as well as guesting on the season premiere of Saturday Night Live Sept. 24.

The outspoken British rock group Radiohead, which has been critical of China’s human rights record, appears to be testing the country’s censored Internet by opening a Chinese microblog account.

Tens of thousands of people have begun following a verified account in the name of the Oxford-based band, which was set up on Friday on Sina Weibo, the most popular microblog site in the country where censors block Twitter.

“Testing the Weibo,” reads the only message posted on the account.

That message was forwarded by more than 10,000 people, drew nearly 4,200 comments and had attracted almost 60,000 followers by Monday.

Many Chinese Radiohead fans said they hoped the account was a sign that the band might be planning their first concert in mainland China.

“I wish I could see you in my lifetime,” one fan commented.

However, a tour seems extremely unlikely in China, where Beijing must approve all bands before they perform.

An official green light would be unlikely for Radiohead, who have played Tibet Freedom concerts and supported jailed democracy activist Liu Xiaobo, the winner of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Chinese authorities have become even more cautious about allowing Western music acts to perform since Iceland’s Bjork closed a 2008 show in Shanghai by shouting “Tibet!” at the end of her song Declare Independence.

Oasis abruptly cancelled planned shows in China in 2009, saying the government had blocked them over guitarist Noel Gallagher’s performance at a Tibet Freedom concert in 1997.

Many Weibo users questioned whether the account was genuine, perhaps because of Radiohead’s politics.

Band representatives could not be reached on Monday to confirm the account.

A Sina spokeswoman, however, told AFP the account was genuine.

“The account is verified so it is true. It’s even recommended in our entertainment news feed,” she said.

Not satisfied to simply release an album and then get on with touring, Radiohead is at it again. First they surprise-released King of Limbs in February, then they launched their version of a newspaper, The Universal Sigh, to follow-up. Now, the British rockers are releasing a series King of Limbs remixes on 12-inch vinyl records. The releases will come out sequentially and be available from XL/Ticker Tape for the duration of the summer.

The first record in the series is due out on July 4 and will include Canadian musician Caribou’s take on Little Boy Blue, and the album’s lead sinlge Lotus Flower as remixed by Jacques Green. Should you be without a turntable, never fear: WAV formats of the songs will be available through Boomkat and radiohead.com.